This is just weird

We’ve been getting complaints from customers that one of our competitors has apparently been scraping the web to see who our customers are and then has been attempting to get the customer to move over to their solution by providing misleading information.

Here’s a couple of examples of emails I’ve received:

“By the way, I just had a voicemail from Herb Shelton at Webroot software. He said he got my name ... from the Sunbelt website. He was doing a salespitch for Webroot, apparently, telling me how much better Webroot was than Sunbelt.”

“FYI, [redacted] called me this a.m. He said he was contacted by Chris Garrison from Webroot who left him a message saying he saw that he was a customer of Sunbelt and he would like to speak with him about enticing him to move over to Webroot…”

So we sent a letter, no response and we just got a report again today of this happening.

I’m a little baffled, frankly, that a competitor would resort to scraping names of customers from case studies and the like and then contact them. Are things really that bad out there? Is there that little new business to generate, rather than resorting to these kind of tactics?

It’s actually kind of funny in a sort of tragic way. An antispyware company spying…